What is the Role of a Shamanic Counselor or Teacher, Really?
An Archetypal-Mythological Point of View
Two training programs I teach with Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies internationally, are 1) professional heart-focusing-oriented shamanic counseling, and sacred breathwork training .™ Both of these closely related programs are essentially a Wounded Healer School. You don’t go to a university, because the psyche, your heart, and your inner life are the “university.” Your own direct experience and direct revelation is the key. What, then is the role of the shamanic counselor and teacher?
In my own lineage we don’t think of the healer as doing the healing. We speak of being a hollow bone or channel for the ultimate healing energies to flow through our intuition and vision, and in such a way that it activates the “doctor within” you. The point is not for the counselor or teacher to solve your problems for you (that kind of solution isn’t lasting even if it helps in the short run), –but to inspire, motivate, give you some tools, and encourage and support you in your own experiential adventure.
It is clarifying if we can get an archetypal view of this process of shamanic initiation, or self-healing and self-exploration through wounded healer work, through which your own experience becomes your library of stored knowledge and wisdom.
We can gain insight into this through an archetypal-level perspective. An archetypal level perspective gives us a kind of objective point of view by taking us out of our everyday imagery, and casting us in a kind of mythological situation. For example, Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst, earlier in his career was at living at a monastery, as he felt there was something monk-like in his nature. But the hierarchy, the hypocrisy, and old outworn belief systems were oppressive for him. Still he ground on their until he had a dream in which he was in the monastery basement, and the four pillars upholding it had gorillas chained to it, and three of them were dead. Having gorillas chained to the supports is not your everyday imagery, but it is quite suggestive and metaphoric if you can feel into it. Johnson had a gift for felt-sensing and immediately divine the message as this: My vital life-energy, that supports my life and need for solitude and community is dying here. I paraphrase it. The point is that the power of these non-ordinary images (i.e. archetypal images) spoke to him dramatically, and as a result; he made the decision to leave the Michigan monastery and move back to California. It was an epochal and life changing decision, as he built the monastic–Jungian life exactly as he needed it to fit him, on the ocean front cottage in California.
I had a similar dream at a time in my life when I was stuck for a year and feeling very miserable, feeling attacked by financial forces beyond my control. I didn’t know what to do. I dreamt that a huge cave man came to the cave in which I was hiding and killed a band of hairy of attacking apes with a huge spear made out of bone. I felt in awe of his power and exhilarated. I awoke feeling vigorous and angry energy in my body, but it was the energy of a fighter. It pulled me out of my stuck-ness in victim thinking and helped me make decisions to change my situation in short order. It also resulted in a major life choice that put me back on my heart-path, where I have remained for nearly 30 years since. This is the power of the archetypal level of the collective unconscious, when it bubbles up into our dreams and visions in mythic proportions.
When we look at the role of the shamanic counselor and teacher, it can also help if we appeal to archetypal-mythological imagery to envision it. The language of the soul is symbol, myth, together with the feeling response it arouses, activating deep intuition.
C.G. Jung considered his own wounded healer initiation to be a mythological Nekyia, a night sea journey, drawing tips and inspiration from Homer’s figure of Odysseus, and Goethe’s Faust. He opened up the whole world of mythology and the mytho-poetic imagination as images to guide a modern initiation. On his adventure, lasting several years he met many guides and spirits, the most famous being his Philemon, who became an inner mentor figure, which he came to call the Old Wise Man. This archetypal figure relates one to the Self as the center and totality of ones being, uniting the heights and depths. Philemon taught him the objectivity of the psyche and became his inner guru (inner teacher). Jung was fortunate to have talent, and the classical education that allowed him to tap this guidance at a time in modern history where there we few shamanic guides in modern culture. Jung had to go it alone and was able to do it, with support of family and a few close friends, and his work as a psychiatrist to ground him. But how much he hoped for a human teacher to inspire and support him, but Freud, as his Jung’s father before him, was unable to perform this role.
Joseph Campbell, inspired by the work of Jung, made a study of the archetypal world mythology and found the universal “monomyth” of the “hero’s journey” to be at the foundations of culture and psycho-spiritual transformation. Campbell was able to link myth, rites of initiation, the archetypes of story-telling with modern psychoanalysis in quite accessible form. Essentially everyone of us is a hero (or heroine) in need of an adventure that results in transformation or individuation. In articulating the relationship between psychoanalysis (Freudian and Jungian) to myth and initiation, Campbell wrote:
The unconscious sends up all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images to the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down to unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.” [Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.8]
Notice how Campbell speaks in the archetypal—mythological imagery to help us see our situation more clearly. He goes on to elaborate the implications, telling us these powers are perceived as dangerous because they threaten the fabric of our everyday lives, our way of living, the securities we have built for ourselves (family, home, work). But he also mentions how “fiendishly fascinating” are these realms, because they lure us into the depths, holding the keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared (the ambivalence of the numinous) “adventure of the discovery of the self.” To be sure, a “destruction of the world”, of the old order is awaiting for the “world” we have here-to-for built. But “a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious and fully human life—that is the lure” which beckons us.
In Campbell’s day, at the time of his writing THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, most psychoanalysts were medical doctors. But if we translate that term to healer, shamanic counselor or teacher, what he says next is illuminating of the role. I quote with gender inclusive words in brackets:
The doctor is the modern master of the mythological realm, the knower of all the secret ways and words of potency. His [or her] role is precisely of the old wise man [or old wise woman] of myth and fairy tales whose words assist the hero through trials and terrors of the weird adventure. He [or she] is the one who appears and points to the magic shinning sword that will kill the dragon-terror, tells of the waiting bride and the castle of many treasures, applies healing balm to the almost fatal wounds, and finally dismisses the conqueror, back into the world of normal life, following the great adventure into the enchanted night.” [ p 9-10]
Campbell goes on to discuss the archetypal structure of the hero’s journey as reflective of rites of passage (birth, marriage, coming of age, shamanic, etc.), which involve the transformation of the personality towards a new level of psycho-social existence. I won’t recount that argument here, but he ends up with a three-fold structure of the hero journey which is 1) Separation from the everyday world, Initiation/Descent into unknown magical depths, and 3) Return with the boon. This also is the structure of shamanic healing processes, including the self-healing and exploratory process of shamanic initiation.
A shaman’s university is largely the school of direct revelatory experience, self exploration and self-healing in which you are initiated by voyaging into your own unconscious, mythological or archetypal depths, searching out and tracking down limiting patterns, soul injuries that bind you, removing obstacles, and awakening and returning with the power to express dormant human potentials in life. This is the boot camp for future shamanic counselors and teachers in today’s modern world.
I would like to shift the terms “Old Wise Man” to the more modern and gender inclusive Mentor. If you recall in the Odyssey, Odysseus ‘s first mentor is Athena, a feminine figure. Think of some of the mentor figures from mythology and film. Odysseus had several others, Circe, Tiresias, for example. Think of Dante’s Vergil and Beatrice. Think of king Arthur’s Merlin and Frodo’s Gandalf, or Luke’s Obi Wan Kenobe, the White Witch of Oz. They appear in modern dress too: Recall the figure of Robert Shaw in Jaws who knows all about sharks. Think of Lou Grant and Mary Tyler Moore, of the tough drill sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman.
The “role of the mentor” is to motivate, inspire and prepare the hero/ine for the adventure—give they lay of the magical land and explain the forces likely to be encountered there, and resourceful and effective ways for dealing with them. The mentor my train you in necessary skills that you will use on your journey. They may test you, battle you, give you a swift kick in the butt sometimes.
The mentor may put you in touch with “inner mentors” (magicians, spirits, ancestors, power animals, figures of active imagination and shamanic journeying, for example). The human mentor may become an inner imaginal mentor. In Star Wars, Luke has fantasy memories of his mentor Obi wan Kenobe, hearing his voice say “Trust the Force Luke” at just the critical moment when that reminder is needed. I remember similar evocations of the voice of my analyst, Helen Luke, when I got myself into a critical archetypal situation. It was very helpful. Jung’s Philemon was a major mentoring figure for him, and helped him lay the foundations for his own theory of the psychology—material for a life’s work.
It is because of the mentor’s own experiential adventure that he or she has the knowledge and wisdom to prepare the hero/ine for their own journey. The mentor can only go so far with you. You must do the journey. It is yours, and only yours to do. No one else can do what needs to be done. You are the hero-heroine.
The mentor will probably give you gifts. In myth it is often the magical sword or potion, the light saber or James Bond’s amazing futuristic gadgets that come in handy in just the kind of situation the mentor intuitively anticipated he would eventually be in. The knowledge and wisdom shared is not to do it for you, but to help you in the magical adventure. It is the same with shamanic counseling and teaching. Everything comes to you as a gift for your own responsibility and use, to inspire, support, protect you as you face the depths of the unknown. The role of the shamanic counselor or teacher is to be a mentor to the initiatory-direct experiential—healing process. One can only be a mentor if one has undergone and benefitted from the experience personally.
It is important to say that the mentor also needs the student in order to be able to express or realize his or her own potentiality as a culture-shaping mentor. Otherwise all that knowledge and experience remains enclosed inside the self. Additionally, the hero or heroine often is like the mentor in someway, especially in their difficulties. This has the effect of being a mirror to the mentor, who is also still on an adventure. We are all initiating into life, for life continually changes and the unknown continues to arise. Each day is an opportunity for an adventure into the unknown. If the mentor thinks they know it all, there is great danger. As we know from myth and cinema, mentors often transform or they die. Think of Robert Shaw being eaten by Jaws. This is said to keep us mindful that we play a role as mentors, but we are also heroes and heroines on an adventure, shamanic healers in the making, still journeying, still discovering, still becoming wounded and needing self-healing.
I have taken a long excursion into archetypal-mythological themes to elucidate what I mean by a shamanic counselor or teacher. At Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies (USA, France, Switerland, Belgium) we use a variety of techniques that activate various non-ordinary states of consciousness to allow us to slip out of the surly bonds of the ego-mind, and descend into the magical landscapes of the collective unconscious, exploring its numinous heights and depths. This is where we use that gift of the shining sword, which Campbell mentioned, to slay the Dragon of unconsciousness. We take voyages and adventures into the unknown and fascinating realms expressed in mythology and visionary art at each event. In the Peruvian Amazon, I underwent my first Ayahuasca experience facilitated by Raul Diego Nelson Fauch, a curandero and researcher who has become like a brother to me. I was delighted by his words before the ayahuasca ceremony. He said, “This ceremony is an initiation in which you will each become your own shaman.” It let me know I was opening up into new territory, and prepared me to take an active and intuitive role in that great voyage into the unknown depths.
I have had numerous other initiations, but this image of “becoming your own shaman” has high resonance with our approach at Crows Nest workshops and retreats, where each learns and heals by becoming their own shaman, their own adventurer and self-healing force on these journeys. Regardless of the technique or ceremony, be they in the form of exploring the archetypal and visionary realms through a classic shamanic journey, the very powerful sacred breathwork ,™ sacred dance, or using powerful core questions and a felt-sense to explore our own depths in a counseling or journaling and dyad formats. Each technique is itself an adventure into the unknown in which you do the traveling, exploring, and self-healing. Our teachers and counselors are mentoring facilitators for these adventures.
I will conclude with a brief summary of the principles that underlie our Crows Nest Training programs.
1) They always happen in a Wounded Healer School. Never is information only, given. It is direct, experiential engagement. It is Initiation!
2) You (whether in the role of a client, counselor, or teacher) are a hero/heroine (undergoing adventure/initiation). No one knows it all. No one is perfect.
3) A shamanic counselor or teacher knows the mythological themes and archetypal figures of the collective unconscious, of the shaman’s cosmos, well enough to share the lay of the land, a guided tour—and give some pointers and principles, and a few tools to help with the adventure. I offer some heart principles (NGS/DIGS, Core Questions, Four Acts of Power, How to open a dream-crux), and some magical tools (shamanic journey methods, archetypal journeys, sacred breathwork ™, focusing on a felt-sense, fire ceremonies, etc).
4) As mentors we give plenty of support, but ideally, know when to step-aside.
5) The shamanic counselor, or teacher, like the mentor, may tell tales of his or her own adventures, trials, failures and victories, not only for his/her own pleasure in doing so, but as a way to further prepare the adventurer for the terrain of their journey into the unknown. This may assist you with ideas of what could happen and how they might be approached.
© C. Mikkal Smith, Crows Nest Centers for Shamanic Studies 2012